Hacker News Reader

Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

How do you not learn a local language after 50 years? Were they also not talking around him?

I don't think I have any special facility with language, but I'm fairly convinced if I had 50 years and the right vocal abilities to make the sounds, I could learn to speak a language from another planet if I were immersed in it.

View on HN

A mental hospital probably isn't a good place to pick up a language, especially if everyone is convinced you can't speak sensibly and your teeth are gone. [Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/19/1]

I’ve seen Chinese and Pakistani people that have lived in New York City for 30+ years and don’t speak a lick of English. Their situation is different though since they have a local community to rely on that speak the same language.

Similarly, I knew a Polish guy who couldn't speak any English after 25 years in London. He once told me "Owen is dead". I had no idea who Owen was but figured it must have been a friend of his. He must've seen by the look of sympathy on my face that I didn't understand, so he beckoned me into the kitchen and pointed at the oven - "Owen".

Plot twist: Owen was in the oven.

I'm an Eastern European myself. Come on! This is really is just nitpicking some unimportant details of pronunciation. It's understandable enough.

I'm married to an immigrant who learned her first English as an adult. I have seen a clear pattern: Those who marry someone who speaks their native language rarely learn much English--they can communicate with their spouse and the community is enough for most other needs. Those who marry someone who doesn't speak their native language learn at least enough English to reasonably communicate with their spouse. It's a much greater driving force.

My wife speaks decidedly broken English (to be expected in someone who learned their first word of English at 43 and didn't even know our alphabet until adulthood), yet now and then she ends up acting as an interpreter for those with even less English than she has.

Spouse or people that need to provide. Invariably the man in the family ends up knowing English unless he’s old and depends on his son.

Disagree. I know multiple providers that speak very little English. There is enough of a Chinese community here that they can work in Chinese businesses where the lack of English isn't a big handicap.

I have no doubt people can stay in linguistic pockets if they want.

I just can't imagine making it past year 1 somewhere nobody spoke my language and not deciding, "I guess I'd better figure this out."

Try imagining being a prisoner in a soviet psychiatric "hospital"...

> discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital

I don't think you fully realize the extent of the meaning of that few words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

Another surprising fact that the guy managed to live so long. Not many survived long in soviet psychiatric hospitals, the conditions there were horrific.

When would get the opportunity while locked up in a psych hospital where everyone thinks you're crazy because you speak 'gibberish'?

fwiw according to Russian news[0] workers knew he was Hungarian, and reached out to Hungarian officials to claim him, but didn't hear back. According to article at the time when Hungary was prepping to join EU, ex nazi PoW was not a priority.

He only was "rediscovered", when Russian hospital personnel got him speaking Hungarian on camera for Russian news, and eventually news segment was picked up in Hungary and 80 Hungarian families came forward to claim him as a missing relative.

[0] https://ren.tv/news/lifestyle/887400-poslednii-plennyi-vtoro...

The article also says the Hungarian side later confirmed he did have a mental illness but it's RenTV which is not a very trustable source so one should take it with a grain of salt.

After fifty years locked up, of course he had a mental illness. It's amazing he was still sapient.

Unfortunately, I think it's likely that many of us would have mental problems if we went fifty years without talking to another human.

He was in a Russian psychiatric hospital.

Psychiatric hospitals in many countries are an extension of the prison system.

You don't just learn a language by osmosis. You need resources, and people to work with you.

Is that how you learnt English (or whatever your first language is) then, not metaphorical osmosis but by sitting down as a small child with lots of resources and people to work with you in deliberate study?

It's proven to be harder as we age, but it absolutely does work like that. I would assume Toma didn't more because of little interaction, not hearing dialogue around him, etc.

(And also just because it typically works like that doesn't mean he couldn't have been unusually predisposed against it, or genuinely ill, or too traumatised/uninterested/deliberately disengaging.)

I'd argue that children actually do put in a lot of effort. Parents sit down and teach the kids stuff, and kids are motivated to try and remember things their friends say to them. No empirical evidence though, just a thought.

Parents read picture books to children, play little games to reinforce the associations etc.

It's not automatic, but I can't imagine not trying. Maybe for the first year, you hold out hope of going back, but after that, if people are talking around you, do you not try? If you hear them use the same word for the same thing every time, don't you learn it? Don't you find ways to ask?

I spent nearly 4 years in a country and barely learnt a thing, everything I knew was from online courses or internet forums.

Even then people still respond to me in English and having a conversation was incredibly hard without paying someone for tutoring, I'd seek out very old shopkeepers to practice some brief interactions but that only gets you so far.

Exposure is nowhere near enough to learn.

I guess maybe I have more facility than I thought. I only spent a month in France, but could do basic things like order food, give directions, or follow a basic friendly conversation, even if I got by with incorrectly conjugated verbs and hand gestures.

In Germany, it was less than two weeks and I could pick up the flow of the sentences even if I still lacked almost all the vocabulary.

I assume it would take longer somewhere with a totally different language structure, like if you dropped me off in Japan, never mind another planet, but 50 years?

After at most a year, I'd have to resign myself to, "I guess I just live here now," and get to work.

I have enough to get by with the basics, but that took concerted effort on my part rather than simply being around it a lot. Nearly everyone would see me as an opportunity to practice English rather than speak in their native tongue, people would switch from one language to the next and not skip a beat to greet me in English.

If everyone in Japan spoke English as a second language you might have a harder time than you think at working on it.

I didn't say simply being around it a lot would pick it up automatically, but you're not the only person to read that into my original post.

Within the first week, I'd be paying close attention to everything people around me said, listening for patterns. Within a month, I would at least be trying to talk to them, albeit probably terribly.

A situation like yours where most people will speak to you in your native language is totally different than one where nobody does for 50 years. If you don't make learning the language they are speaking a high priority sometime in that span, that's not all on them.

To quote:

> I could learn to speak a language from another planet if I were immersed in it.

Maybe others and I misinterpreted but it very much came across as "I would learn it simply by being there"

Oh, I see how it could read that way. I meant it in juxtaposition to a situation where I was not immersed in it, like if they had an easy way to make things accessible to me in my own language instead.

If my only options were "learn this new-to-me language" and "never speak to anybody again" because I was immersed in the new language, I could learn it. It wouldn't happen automatically, but I could do it.

And over 50 years, I can't imagine not doing it. It would be my very top priority after meeting my physical needs well enough to stay alive.

> Even then people still respond to me in English

Netherlands?

Sweden?

It seems like the hospital workers didn't really care enough to talk to him/to make conversation or even to teach him Russian words like "bed", "toilet", etc.

Even having basic vocabulary, it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation...

I grew up in a small city in upstate NY where a lot of eastern Europeans immigrated in the early 20th century up until the second war. Going to my friends' houses in the 80s - it was normal for the extended family to all live under one roof - there were a few families with grandparents who did not speak any English at all, and only spoke Czech, Hungarian, or Polish. Of course, the people these non-English speakers did business with on a daily basis for most of their lives in the US were speakers of those languages, and they could also rely on their children - my friends' parents - to translate.

You're thinking about being part of the society, nog being locked up 24/7 in a single room, and surrounded by people who care about you as much as the office potted plant.

It seems like sadly he got very little social interaction in the hospital.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com